Familypedia:Collaboration of the month
We nominated this site for Collaboration of the month on the Central Wikia. By a margin of 2.5 votes we achieved the December 2006 selection, to run from 15 December to 15 January. Here is an outline of what we believe experienced Wikians may be able to do to help this site become easier to use and therefore more popular. Our nomination paragraphs Everyone has had ancestors and most people like discovering relatives. Join us for a while and add or maybe find a couple of yours! Family historians are good with genealogy software, but wikis are a whole new world for some and we would like tips from experienced Wikians for things such as templates and references. There are other good genealogy wikis; help Wikia to keep this one flourishing! (I will be active most days until at least 21 December; after that try Bill Willis). Robin Patterson 19:21, 23 November 2006 (UTC) What we really need help with is with features needed to improve the functionality of the Genealogy Wiki. There are several features that are critically needed, but require expertise with the development of extensions to the underlying program. Of particular importance is developing a simpified system for entering basic data about an individual. Individual articles vary in organization, but all "person" articles include certain basic data such as Date of Birth, Date of Death, Spouse, Children, etc. Because of the nature of genealogy the same data often has to be entered on several different articles. For example, a typical article includes a list of children (a child list). That list usually includes basic information about the child, such as their date of birth, spouse, etc. Eventually each child on the list may get a separate article as well. That article will include the same information as given in each parent's "child" list. Currently, that information has to be manually duplicated; what's needed is a system that automatically creates the child page, and then transfers the needed information from the parental page. And ideally a similar system to create parent pages from an individual's page. Those can probably be done with text boxes, etc., but currently that doesn't seem to be a capability of the wiki programming. An extension is needed to add that capability.Bill 02:50, 29 November 2006 (UTC) Our "blurb" on Central Wikia, to show on the Main Page See the note from Sannse at http://www.wikia.com/wiki/User_talk:Robin_Patterson#CotM and http://www.wikia.com/wiki/Collaboration_of_the_month/Genealogy/Blurb. We have to write something, probably shorter than our total nomination paragraphs (above) but presumably based on them. Robin has just done the first draft of it, which is likely to be still too long. More detailed explanations for visitors (Please ask questions as they come to mind.) Contribution from Mark, inventor of the genealogy "webBase" (''By late Feb 2007 this section was getting very long. So a new page was considered desirable. Please see, and comment on, Genealogy:Beyond webBases (and maybe more derived pages in the future). Page history up to this moment will have to remain on this page. Mark (still using IP numbers) detailed some of the 10-year history of the webBases (of which the largest, CRAWFORD, had over 10,000 individuals). All had several ways of displaying families and lists, with single-entry of data using input-boxes as in commercial genealogy programs. Mark then mentioned his recent work with zoho.com and google spreadsheets (preferring the former). Bill commented on some of it, mentioning his Vitabox work. Then it got technical - HTML, extensions, embedding, ... Robin Patterson 12:51, 27 February 2007 (UTC) '') See also * *Genealogy:Portal:Box-Skeleton Template